This disclosure relates generally to customizing search by enabling selection of one or more signals for use in searching.
Search engines provide information about resources (e.g., Web pages, images, text documents, and multimedia content) that are responsive to users' queries. A search result may include, for example, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and a snippet of information for a resource responsive to a query. Search results may be ranked according to scores assigned to the search results by a scoring function. The scoring function generates the scores for the search results according to various signals, for example, where and how often query terms appear in the search results and how common the query terms are in the search results.
A user may give more weight to search results that are associated with reviews, opinions, or other content associated with a user's social graph (e.g., contacts of the user). A user's social graph can be based, in part, on social networks to which the user subscribes. Signals based on a user's social graph may be used to affect the retrieval, scoring, and display of search results.